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Rob Zacny

Episode 386: Steel Panthers

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Three Moves Ahead 386:

Three Moves Ahead 386


Steel Panthers
Fun fact: Did you know that if you search for "Steel Panthers" on Google Images you will find both A) screenshots of the Steel Panthers series and B) photographs of an active glam rock band named Steel Panther? Go ahead, look for yourself. I'll wait. Did you check? Pretty crazy that people are still into that. In any case, our Patreon supporters voted and decided that this month Rob and Troy "It's all about penetration and angles" Goodfellow talk about Steel Panthers the video game. Not the band.

Steel Panthers, Steel Panthers 2, The Operational Art of War, Command Ops

 

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A Command Ops 2 show would be great. The modules on Steam are basically all of their old games updated to work in the new engine - but for some reason have been given new names. 'Foothills of the Gods' and 'The Cauldron' are the Conquest of the Aegean maps. 'Ride of the Valkyries' and 'Bastogne' are the Command Ops 1 maps. 'Westwall' and 'Knock On All Doors' are new maps created for CO2.

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Regarding not being able to see your units: Go to preferences and turn unit numbering on! This highlights units nicely, and for infantry units tells you how many individuals are there, and all the other units in the same platoon as the selected unit glow orange, and the platoon leader is marked with brackets. Now you can go back and play it properly.

This works in SP:WOW, and I'm sure it is the case in SP3 as well.

My other tip is to put "Scroll delay" on 3 - on modern computers the default XXX speed is way too fast.

Steel Panthers 3 was the game that encouraged me to buy my first PC. Eventually I fell into the bad habit (in the solitaire scenario generator at least) of just having 1 HQ, 1 ammo dump, 1 or 2 scout helicopters, and spending the rest of my points on MLRS batteries.

What are people's opinion on the "C&C" mechanic in SP3?, do people play with it off or on? I remember finding it a bit confusing, but it's 15 years since I played it, I must dust it off and give it another go.

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Bummer to hear what sounded like an overall assessment of "hasn't aged well."  Unlike Star Wars Rebellion, I've put Steel Panthers in a good place in my long-term gaming memory.  It's yet another game I have been wanting to revisit in hopes of extracting maximum mileage.   I own a copy of the current winSPMBT iteration along with all the yearly patches, but still haven't made the time to play.  Alas, it's not the first time that Rob and Troy have reminded us that many of the fondly remembered games of our youth have not aged well.  C'est la vie in the world of technology.

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With respect to not ageing well, part of it is that the graphics of the day were designed for CRT monitors, often in graphics modes with non-square pixels. Between the aspect ratio differences and the "free" antialiasing you got from CRTs (color tended to bleed between adjacent pixels, and artists took advantage of that), many of these titles now look objectively worse than they did on their intended hardware.

 

In addition to that, though, there's been a lot of experimentation in UI in the last 40 years; we know a lot more about interface design than we did even in the 2000s, let alone the 1990s.

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I have always SP World At War and WinSPWW2 in my hard drive. Even though I know the latter is better considered, the bigger scenarios are not for me... I still prefer chosing a small/medium scenario in SPWaW and blowing waves of T-34s with my Tigers for example. The original SP1 is still really fun to play using Dosbox.

 

Regarding similar games, don't forget John Tiller's Squad Battles games. I know they are the ugliest in the world (mods aside) but they give a really interesting feeling of close combat in tight low unit scenarios. Unlike in SP, SB games model quite well infantry combat (in a lower level, you can for example change your weapons, take enemy's heavy weapons...) but they are not so good at vehicle combat. If you like a higher point of view of the battle the new Panzer Battles are also really fun.

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